For purposes of the description provided herein, “depth-enhanced picture” refers to a representation of a scene that contains or references information associated with different depths, or distances from an image capture device. The depth-enhanced picture may contain representations of objects, each of which is associated with a perceived or actual distance from the image capture device. One example of a depth-enhanced picture is a light-field picture, which may contain information about the direction of light as it arrives at a sensor within a data acquisition device such as a light-field camera. Any number of rendered images can be generated from such a light-field picture; the rendered images can be associated with different depths. When a rendered image is generated from a picture, the rendered image has a focus depth; those objects in the picture that have a depth at or near that image's focus depth appear in focus, while other objects may appear out of focus.
Light-field data can be used to create representations of scenes that can be manipulated by a user. Subsequent to capture of picture data, light-field processing can be used to generate rendered images using the captured picture data. Various types of light-field processing can be performed, including for example refocusing, aberration correction, 3D viewing, parallax shifting, changing the viewpoint, and the like. These and other techniques are described in the related U.S. Utility Applications referenced above.
Conventionally, images may be represented as digital data that can be stored electronically. Many such image formats are known in the art, such as for example JPG, EXIF, BMP, PNG, PDF, TIFF and/or HD Photo data formats. Such image formats can be used for storing, manipulating, displaying, and/or transmitting image data.
Conventionally, two-dimensional images can be enhanced by adding comments, labels, titles, tags, annotations, captions, and the like. Such enhancements can be applied to particular locations within a two-dimensional image. In this manner, for example, a label can be generated which points to a particular location with a two-dimensional image; such a label can identify, for example, an object within the image.
In general, existing techniques for adding such tags do not take into account depth characteristics of pictures, and are thus limited in their utility when applied to depth-enhanced pictures such as may be made available by the use of light-field photography.